Wind Pressure - Wall Inside of and Open Building

[marinaman]

I'm trying to calculate the wind pressure on a wall inside of an open building.

The building is a single story car repair shop. The building is 200' long and 80' wide. It has roll-up garage doors on both sides, all the way down the 200' long length of the building.

The owner wants me to design a light gage wall to divide the building space.

Looking at ASCE 7 for wind pressures, I can not decide which pressure method to use.

If the roll-up doors are all down, the building is enclosed. The new interior wall would only be subject to minimum lateral wind pressure.

If some of the roll-up doors were open, the building would be partially enclosed. It looks like ASCE Chapter 27 would apply (Part 1), as if some doors were open, the new wall would "act" as a perimeter wall, and be subject to typical lateral wind pressure.

If all of the roll-up doors were open, the building would be open. Chapter 27 would not apply, because ASCE does not appear to address wall in open building plans. It looks like pressure on the wall would then come from calculating pressures as if the wall were a stand alone wall per ASCE 7 Chapter 30....Cases A B and C

The pressures from all calculated cases mentioned above are above the minimum pressure of 16 psf

It looks like the "stand alone" scenario governs....by far....if this is applicable.

What are your thoughts here? Is there another calculatable case that I'm not considering?

 

[DanKile]

The building would most likely have been design for the doors to be closed at design wind speeds. Designing this partition wall to the same wind speed would overly conservative. If you want to go above the code minimum of 5psf, I would pick a wind speed that the doors can stay open for. You can use engineering judgment or the deflection wind maps in the commentary to choose a speed. The minimum for this load case shouldn't be 16psf but 5psf.